


now don't lose faith (just keep your eyes on me)

by badacts



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, Red Hood and the Outlaws (Comics), Under the Red Hood
Genre: Body Horror, Canonical Character Death, Child Death, Family, Gen, Horror, How Many Death Tags Can We Hit?, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Magic, Past Character Death, batfam
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-17
Updated: 2020-07-13
Packaged: 2021-02-26 16:47:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21831544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/badacts/pseuds/badacts
Summary: This is a story about Gotham's revenant problem, starting (and ending) with Jason Todd.
Relationships: Jason Todd & Bruce Wayne, Tim Drake & Jason Todd
Comments: 15
Kudos: 172





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic isn't actually as bad as the tags make it seem, I'm just covering my ass. 
> 
> It's good ol' family feels vs. the undead! Honestly, what better.

Tim’s language is information. The collection and the translation and the piecing together of the millions of fragments that make their way into his net each day. Tim’s not Oracle, but he’s no slouch - he can make the internet work for him, on top of the people he talks to and the whispers he catches from the air above alleyways at night. And then, once he has the data, he puts it together. He’s a  _ detective _ .

He finds things he isn’t strictly looking for all the time. But it’s rare that one of those things makes the hair on the back of his neck stand on end.

_ \- boy, 15, found - _

His comm hisses to life in his ear. “Red Robin. I have your position outside of your planned patrol route.”

Tim had been expecting Babs, not Batman, but he doesn’t reply. After all, it wasn’t a question. 

He wipes some rain from his forehead and keeps moving, flashlight aimed low. He’s out of costume - too conspicuous - but still, the last thing he needs is to attract attention. On the downside, his civvies are a long way from waterproof. By the time he gets home, he’ll be soaked to the skin.

“Are you working?” Bruce asks into the silence.

“Yes,” Tim says, which is mostly true. With them, the line between business and personal has always been exceptionally thin. 

_ Daniel de Silva...Mary Wolyncewicz...David Peter Andrews...Rachael and Lewis Therault… _

_ Beloved, beloved, beloved. Rest in peace.  _ And Tim’s personal favourite,  _ devoted.  _

He smells it before he sees it - under the scent of the rain, there’s dark earth, turning mud. He slows down, careful where he steps. 

The headstone lurches out of the dark, white as bone in the torchlight. Marc Rand, beloved son, apparently taken too soon. The dates confirm it - fifteen is very young to die.

It’s the ground before the headstone that Tim is interested in, though. The sod is folded backwards, dirt scattered in heavy clods on top of the grass. In the middle of it is a yawning hole, roughly made and already slumping back in on itself. 

In the bottom, Tim can see shattered wood and scarlet satin and no trace of a body.

That’s not much of a surprise to him. After all, that body was just checked into a hospital ten blocks away, complete with a pulse.

Tim hadn’t been looking. Instead, he’d heard that the Memorial Hospital had a sudden power outage that plunged the entire facility into darkness and silence for just under two minutes, when the electricity returned just as suddenly. The back-up generators had never come on. Three emergency surgeries had been interrupted and the intensive care ward had come back to life in a cacophony of alarms, but no one has died.

When Tim checked the revived CCTV cameras to find out whether the outage was intentional, he’d found one lone bed in the hallway of the emergency department, apparently abandoned in favour of people who could still be saved as ventilators sputtered out and vital monitoring equipment went dark.

The bed contained one John Doe, found with severe injuries and pronounced dead on the scene, according to the hastily-entered details in the records. Except, as Tim watched, the dead Doe sat up. And then the lights came back on.

Facial recognition had led him here, to a gravesite and a boy who’d died six months back, and a body that had either been forcibly dragged from the casket or climbed free under its own power. A body, or a boy, who’d apparently been walking into the middle of the street when a car hit him, killing him instantly. A body that had been transported to the hospital, forgotten on the way to the morgue, until it - he? - sat up and gave a passing nurse the fright of her life by asking for his mother.

Either Gotham EMTs are getting worse at telling a dead kid from a live one, or this is something in defiance of medical explanation. 

And this  _ is _ Gotham. Anything can happen here. But something like this? Tim, with all of his experience with the crazy and the strange, can admit that the sight of a boy with half of his skull crumpled inwards, still wearing a mud-covered suit but sitting up under his own power, is fucking  _ creepy _ .

So Tim’s here in the rain next to an empty grave, knowing there’s another empty grave a few rows over, and wondering if those two things are related.

Behind him, there’s a whisper of sound.

There’s a time and a place for a carefully maintained air of civilian reaction. A graveyard where the occupants seem to have trouble staying dead isn’t it. Tim spins, loosing the knife from its sheath on his forearm with a twist that drops the hilt into his palm, his flashlight going flying and flickering out as it hits the ground.

With it dead, the only source of light is the streetlight refraction from the clouds overhead. All Tim can see is a big, black shape behind him, and he strikes out and -

\- stops.

It’s only many hours of blindfolded training in the cave that has him pausing in trying to push his knife through half an inch of woven kevlar into Batman’s throat underneath. That, and the span of Bruce’s hand, unmovable around Tim’s forearm.

For a moment, they’re both frozen. Then Bruce says, “A knife?”

Tim huffs a little, shaking the grip off his wrist and sliding the weapon back out of sight. “Sneaking up on me in a graveyard in the middle of the night?”

“It’s a fine piece,” Bruce notes, because he has a one track mind and the advantage of the nightvision in his mask to actually see.

“I have expensive tastes,” Tim says automatically, which is actually only true in regards to clothes and cars. The knife, hilt done in delicate gold and green enamel and blade showing the ripples of quality steel, was a gift. It has the mark of the League of Shadows etched into the underside of the crosstree. “Why are you here?”

Bruce is silent, presumably because the answer is obviously  _ I was concerned about you _ . He moves away briefly, and then returns to put something muddy into Tim’s hand that resolves into the flashlight after a moment of confusion. 

Tim flicks it back on, and as he does so the beam of light falls over the disturbed grave. Bruce, almost imperceptibly, stiffens.

“What is this?” he growls.

“I’m not sure yet,” Tim says, “But I’m going to find out.”

* * *

Roy Harper is the loudest thing on this island. And right now he’s proving it with a shouted, “Fuck! Jaybird, get in here!”

Jason doesn’t move, or answer. At this point he knows what Roy sounds like when he’s genuinely concerned, and this isn’t it. His point is proven when Roy appears in the doorway holding a tablet aloft. 

“Look at this shit!” he says, torn between being pissed off and delighted. “Your brother is a little bastard.”

“I don’t have a brother,” Jason replies blandly, even though he’s already imagining the awkward reunion between Kori and her ex. Maybe that’s what’s happening on the tablet. The question of how Dick would find them on the island is a niggle that he’ll deal with later.

“He’s destroying my stuff,” Roy says, ignoring Jason entirely in favour of shoving the tablet in his face.

When Jason sees the uniform on the screen, he shoves the tablet right back. “Do those robots have a kill mode?”

On screen, Tim fucking Drake is using his bo staff to fend off Roy’s sentry robots, and the shithead has the nerve to be grinning while he does it.

“Nah,” Roy replies, though he’s giving Jason a serious side-eye, “If you want him dead, you gotta do the honours yourself.”

Jason sighs and stands, 

“You’re not really gonna kill him,” Roy says, with certainty, and then, with less certainty, “Right? Jason.  _ Jason- _ ”

“Call off the robots,” Jason tells him, heading for the beach and shoving his handguns into their holsters as he goes.

* * *

Tim is standing over one of the robots which hasn’t retreated into its hidden idle mode, mostly because it’s laying in the sand smoking gently. He looks up when Jason breaks out of the tree line to demand, “Did you make these?”

“What do you want?” Jason says instead of answering, and he’s only not got the kid at gunpoint out of some faint vestiges of courtesy, or maybe just residual guilt over what Alfred would say about it.

Tim looks deeply out of place in the light of day in his uniform, never mind on a beach. He collapses his staff down in a smooth movement and says, “Just to talk.”

“They have this thing called phones, you know,” Jason says, and then, “If you’re here to tell me someone’s dead, you could have just called and saved yourself the trip.”

Tim doesn’t react, but it’s the non-reaction that gives him away. He says, “No one’s dead.”

Jason crosses his arms. “Is someone dying?”

“Not the last time I checked,” Tim replies, with the casual morbid humour of someone who has come way too close to dying more than once. That one of those occasions was at Jason’s hands doesn’t seem to bother him: he looks his usual levels of competent, curious, and more than a little uptight. “What happened between you dying and you going into the Lazarus Pit?”

Jason’s ears  _ roar _ .

For a second he thinks it’s the bubbling madness of the pit, triggered by the mere mention of it. Then he realises he’s more likely to faint than lose it. The shock of it - ‘trigger’ is the right word for it, he thinks.

He’s certain, though, that the only outward sign of all of that is a minor twitch of his shoulders. He says, “Don’t remember.”

Tim watches him for a long moment, irritatingly knowing. Not patient, exactly - that word couldn’t be used to describe any Robin - but unmovable. Like he’d wait all night to win something. 

His gaze darting up and away from Jason feels like a victory until Jason feels the rolling heat from above him. He looks up.

“Is this man bothering you?” Kori asks him, completely without irony. She’s hovering six feet up, her non-Tamaranean clothes smoking faintly.

“Red Robin isn’t big enough to bother me,” Jason tells her, despite knowing that Tim doesn’t give a shit that he’s a shortass. 

“Starfire,” Tim greets politely. “I just needed to speak with Jason.”

“He was just leaving,” Jason says hopefully. 

Roy jogs up the beach towards them. He’s still wearing boardshorts, but has his quiver over his shoulder and his unstrung bow on his back. He moves like a racehorse, hair streaming in the wind. Like Baywatch if you like skinny redheads. Kori seems appreciative, at least.

“You’re still alive,” Roy greets Tim, as though that’s a normal thing to say. Tim seems unbothered, though perhaps a little taken aback by the sight of Arsenal in flip flops. “What brings you to our pleasant shores? You owe me for the RoyBots you broke, by the way.”

Tim mouthes  _ RoyBots _ like he’s testing the taste of it, and then repeats, “I needed to speak with Jason.” Then he adds, “Then I’m leaving.”

“Babybird has a curfew,” Jason says, and it’s fucking annoying that he sounds more like a teasing brother than a bully. Not that he wants to be a bully, but he also doesn’t want a new brother.  _ Any _ brothers. 

Friends have always treated him better than family, adopted family included. Case in point: Roy standing on his left and Kori touching down on his right, flanking him without even thinking about it.

Tim, undaunted, looks between them, and then says, “I need your help.”

“With what?” Roy asks, immediately and predictably eager.

“He means mine,” Jason corrects. “Why are you asking about Lazarus Pits, Timothy?”

There aren’t many reasons Tim Drake would fly all this way to talk to Jason. However, there aren’t many other better sources on Lazarus Pits who won’t kill Tim on sight, never mind happily offer up what they know to him.

“It’s not the Pit,” Tim says. “It’s more the ‘coming back from the dead’ thing.”

“Can’t help you,” Jason replies immediately. “I don’t remember anything between a bomb and a dunk in that nasty magic water.” 

Tim huffs a little. Then he pulls a phone from his pocket and tosses it underarm to Jason, who snatches it from the air before either of the others can destroy it in his defence. They’re already looking mighty twitchy.

There’s a photo pulled up on the screen. It’s vaguely flash-damaged, rain drops wrecking the quality, and it takes Jason a moment to understand what he’s seeing. When it clicks, his stomach rolls. He tastes earth and blood, chest crushing in on itself for a protracted moment until he looks away.

“Grave robbers in Gotham?” Jason attempts, but his voice rasps out tellingly. He throws the phone back, overarm.

Tim still catches it. “You were less of a one-off than previously thought.”

“I’m not the first one to have an unlikely recovery.” Superman, Green Arrow...

“No,” Tim agrees, “But not like this.”

If there’s one thing Jason knows about Red Robin, it’s that he doesn’t make leaps of logic without proof. He asks, “So, what is it you want from me, exactly?”

“Come back with me,” Tim says immediately. “I could use another pair of eyes on this.”

“No,” Jason replies. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m done with that city.”

“So the plan is just to stay here? Forever?” Tim sounds pretty judgemental, considering ‘here’ is a tropical paradise.

“The plan is to not go back to Gotham,” Jason corrects. “There’s still the rest of the world.” He’s not too taken with the rest of the world either right now, but he figures that will change sooner or later. He got the whirlwind tour of the shittiest parts under Talia’s tutelage, but he might go to Italy and hit up some museums, maybe eat some gelato. 

“You’re not a little curious?” Tim asks. “Some kid climbs out of his own grave in the same cemetery you were buried in and wanders into a traffic accident that somehow also doesn’t kill him, and you want to sit on the beach and eat coconuts?”

There’s a long silence. Then Jason asks, “The same cemetery?” Because it’s not like the kid mentioned that little tidbit before. 

“Maybe you’re done with Gotham,” Roy says. Apparently he  _ can _ be quiet, because his voice now is on the wrong side of gentle. “But it sounds kinda like Gotham isn’t done with you just yet, Jay.”

“Trust me. I wouldn’t be here for anything that wasn’t immediately applicable to you, or that you wouldn’t be useful for,” Tim adds. “Gotham doesn’t need any more duffel bags of heads.”

To his credit, he sounds neither smugly superior nor disturbed, just matter-of-fact. Jason can almost respect that. Sort of.

Also, now that the impassioned need to shoot Batman in the face is fading, he has questions that his memories - vague, blood-stained, smelling like earth and dew and rain and terror - definitely can’t answer, starting in that cemetery.

“Fine,” he says at last. “You have a week.” After that, he’ll be outside the city limits like someone lit his ass on fire. 

“I brought the batplane,” Tim volunteers. Apparently when he gets what he wants, he turns into a fucking people-pleasing puppy. 

“Great,” Jason says. “I’m driving.” 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shitty parental relationships and bad bastardisations of good poetry.

Tim actually lets Jason fly them back, despite the creeping urge to tranq him and shove him into one of the storage lockers. 

The problem with Jason is that he never lets anything go. A little bit of sedation between pseudo-brothers would be a sore spot for years, and the two of them don’t really need any more of those to poke at in the wrong moments.

However, the flight would definitely be smoother if Jason wasn’t at the helm. Tim grits his teeth in the co-pilot seat and bears it.

The outcome is the important part, he tells himself. He’s taking Jason back to Gotham, where there’s at least a twenty percent he’ll actually help instead of just causing a massive hindrance. This low level of expectation means that Tim isn’t surprised when Jason lands them on top of a building in the Bowery - still shielded, at least - and rolls straight out of the jet with a casual, “See you later, Timmy.”

The tracker Tim stuck onto his jacket heads down the stairs and out onto the sidewalk at normal human pace, before rapidly accelerating down the street. The secondary tracker that Tim was much more careful about planting continues walking in the opposite direction.

Tim grins to himself and takes off, heading back to the Cave. 

He can pretty much already predict where Jason is going, anyway, once night falls. The graveyard, and then the hospital.

That means, when Red Hood lands on the roof adjacent to the hospital later that night, Tim gets the unique thrill of startling him when he says, “Don’t bother. He’s in an induced coma.”

“…Little Red,” Jason says.

“Does that make you ‘Big Red’ or ‘Riding Hood’?” Tim wonders, and then, before Jason can answer, “What did you think of the graveyard?”

Half of wearing a mask is learning your own particular method of intimidation. Tim’s is his ruthless intelligence and his peerlessly clever strategies. Red Hood’s is his disdain for adhering to the Bat’s Shalt Not Kill rules even now, and a taste of a smirk that carries through his voice if not through his expressionless mask.

Jason Todd is and always has been a street brawler, all pure physicality. Born to fight. That’s all Tim can think when he growls, “You stalkin’ me?”

“Don’t need to,” Tim replies. Because Robins are all reckless, he adds, “You’re just kind of predictable.”

Even as he says it, he knows it’s fifty-fifty whether that’ll make Jason hit him. He doesn’t bother to feel relieved when it earns him a laugh instead.

“Alright, batbrat,” Jason replies. It seems as though he loses a couple of inches of height when he relaxes from his loom over Tim. “What do you know about Rand?”

“C’mon,” Tim says, and fires his grapple across to the hospital roof. He’s done the same thing hundreds of times on this building, from all angles - he’s jumping before the grapple even hooks on, falling for a weightless moment before the cord pulls tight and throws him in a swooping arc to the window he’s aiming for.

He lands lightly on the window ledge, balancing on the balls of his feet. Jason follows him a moment later, surprisingly graceful for someone of his size balancing on two inches of formed concrete.

“That’s him,” Tim murmurs, gaze fixed through the window.

Marc Rand hardly looks peaceful in unconsciousness, with the number of tubes and wires tethering him to this plane. It’s fitting - it’s not like he was exactly resting in peace like his headstone wished. 

“Huh,” Jason says under his breath, “Looks like a kid.”

“He’s fifteen,” Tim replies absently. Even he’s not sure whether he’s agreeing or disagreeing. He’s distracted by the strange tone in Jason’s voice, hard to identify through his helmet.

“Yeah, exactly,” Jason mutters. “So?”

“So what?”

“Rand. Fill me in.” 

“Oh, it’s all on the computer back at the Cave,” Tim says without looking away from Rand’s form in the hospital bed.

Stillness. Then Jason snarls, “What are you playing at?”

“Relax,” Tim replies easily. “Just because I didn’t take your drama into account doesn’t mean I’m ‘playing at’ anything.”

“I won’t go there.”

“Then you’ll have to wait until I can transfer the information to you,” Tim chirps. “Do you use Mac or PC? I’ll copy you a pendrive.”

“Are you fucking-”

“Kidding? No.” Tim fires his grapple back across to the roof they came from, but before he can, a hand catches in the fabric of his cape. “I wouldn’t do that.”

“Wouldn’t you?” There’s a taste of teasing in Jason’s voice. Tim hates it.

Maybe he underestimated the degree to which the two of them are oil and water. Oil and matches. Maybe they’re going to end up having a round two of their first meeting. Tim doesn’t want that, but he also doesn’t let it stop him from driving his elbow back into Jason’s sternum.

Jason dodges. He says, amused, “I’m wearing armour, do you not like your funny bone?” And while he’s distracted, Tim uses the shift of Jason’s own weight to drop the both of them off of the window ledge.

His grapple is strong enough to hold both of their weights even geared up, but Tim’s cape isn’t. Jason, showing a previously-unseen degree of good sense, lets go of Tim in favour of firing his own grapple.

Tim rockets upwards, unhooking and rolling over the lip of the building in one motion. He considers looking back to check whether Jason is a paste on the sidewalk below - and boy, he can’t wait to have _that_ conversation with Bruce - but thinks better of it. Red Hood would never submit to dying in such a pedestrian way, and also if Tim’s right, which he always is, Hood will be right behind him.

He’s halfway across the roof when something hits him in the back of his shoulder. 

He has a split second to wonder what was that before he’s dragged backwards off of his feet. There’s a shrieking rip of kevlar-reinforced fabric, and then the back of Tim’s skull hits the rooftop. _Hard_.

Then he’s on his belly, with Jason’s knee in the small of his back. Tim gasps, “ _Did you just shoot me with a grapple gun_?”

“Yeah,” Jason says, self-satisfaction dripping from his voice. 

“You-” Tim says, and then gags, heaving. 

“Whoops,” Jason says, removing his knee in favour of flipping Tim onto his side. He _puts Tim in the recovery position_.

Tim hooks his leg around Jason’s neck and rolls them. He ends up on top, Jason’s throat pressed between his thigh and calf while he debates the pros and cons of just choking the life of them.

Jason slaps Tim’s thigh and whispers, “Uncle!”

“You could have impaled me,” Tim replies. Honestly, it’s a miracle Jason didn’t. Their grapples are designed to lock into masonry, complete with barbed hooks with fingerprint releases. The aim it would have taken to hook just Tim’s cape - well, clearly running around with guns has some benefits.

“No,” Jason squeaks, somehow managing to sound offended as well as like he’s inhaled helium.

Tim, who absolutely was faking the gagging before, turns his head just enough to avoid puking on Jason’s stupid mask.

Jason, released from Tim’s hold by his sudden slump sideways, says, “…whoops.”

* * *

Gotham is a stinking, ratshit city sulking in a sickly combination of sea fog and smoke. Goddamn, Jason missed it.

Things he didn’t miss so much: being in the same locale as his own headstone. 

He’s aiming for the grave of Marc Rand, recently undeceased, but his feet move of their own accord to a spot on the northern side of the cemetery. He’s been here once before - it was raining, and he’d been sick when his boots stirred the smell of wet soil underfoot, spent the night shaking and sleepless in the dingy studio apartment he’d been squatting in.

Now, his helmet filters that out. He takes in the smooth white marble of the twin headstones, one for Catherine and one for him. A memento to his old life, still bedecked with a bouquet of white carnations. 

He’s not sure what possesses him to look closer at the flowers. They’re fresh white, unstained by smog and age so far, with a card on the tie binding the stems. He’s expecting the name of one of Bruce’s society pals, looking to make nice by dropping flowers on some dead Crime Alley kid’s grave, or maybe some stalker Wayne fan. 

Instead, the card says: _I am the soft stars that shine at night_.

“I am not there,” Jason murmurs, words falling like stones into the silence, “I do not sleep.” 

He always loved that poem. It’s either a particularly on-the-nose joke on Bruce’s part, or something else entirely. And he knows it’s Bruce - even in the florist’s typography, the ‘- B’ is instantly recognisable to a child who grew up in Wayne Manor.

So that’s why he follows Tim back to the Cave from the hospital. That, and the fact that his replacement may or may not fall off his bike on the way without supervision.

Of course, Timmy doesn’t seem particularly pleased to have his help. If looks could kill, Jason would be dead for the second time right about now.

“Just sit there and don’t touch anything,” he tells Jason, pressing an ice pack to the back of his head with his left hand while typing at the computer with his right. He sounds grumpy. Not angry, as such, but still low-key pissed that Jason dared give him a teeny, tiny concussion.

Really, he should have caught himself. Jason is good, but so is Red Robin, and Red Robin can’t afford to be taken out by an (admittedly ably assisted) tumble on a rooftop.

Jason is going to keep putting down the fact that Tim did get him in a chokehold to his brief moment of mistaken sympathy. He’s going to have a bruise in the shape of Robin’s shinguard on his throat to remind him of that, too.

“Here,” Tim says, files folding out across the largest screen. “This is everything I have on Rand. I’d read it to you, but I’m still seeing double.” Because he’s dramatic as hell.

“I didn’t grow up on the same street as you, but I can still fucking read,” Jason snaps, waiting for Tim to vacate his personal space before he steps closer to the computer. There’s a discarded batarang there, gleaming black against the table, and Jason can’t resist picking it up to feel the familiar weight. Tim isn’t watching, and what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him. Probably.

Of course, before Jason can start the aforementioned reading, the Batmobile pulls into its spot, its familiar snarl cutting to silence. 

It’s not like Jason didn’t know there was a decent chance of running into Bruce when he came here. It’s just that he’s never as prepared for it when it actually happens as he thinks he will be beforehand.

Batman is hard to read in the cowl, but Jason can tell he isn’t surprised to find the two of them here. His attention jumps to Tim, still holding the ice pack, and he demands, “What happened?”

“Hit my head,” Tim replies, surly, with another of those killer looks at Jason. “It’s fine. We’re going over the Rand case.”

“Let me look,” Bruce replies, pulling back the cowl and letting it hang down his back. Tim, sighing, allows it with bad grace. “Were you knocked out?”

“No. It’s a mild concussion.” 

“They just don’t make Robins like they used to,” Jason says lightly, because he doesn’t want to watch this - the Bat clucking over his newest chick.

“I’m not the one that died,” Tim points out. He’s a shithead, and any regret Jason might have felt over giving him a head injury evaporates.

“Not yet,” he says, and even he isn’t sure whether it’s a threat or not.

Bruce pulls away from Tim, pressing the ice pack in Tim’s hand back into place. “We’ll get Leslie to check you.”

“I’m fine!” Tim exclaims, waving his free hand in exasperation. 

“We don’t take risks with head injuries,” Bruce says, like it’s a lesson learned by rote, right before he turns his gaze onto Jason. “Did you do this?”

Jason shrugs. “I maintain he did it to himself. Turns out he’s clumsy as hell.”

“Fuck you,” Tim mutters at him. Jason would have gotten a double swear jar penalty for that one, but Tim doesn’t even get a look.

“You injured him. Again.”

Tim rolls his eyes. “It was an accident, Bruce. I’m _fine_.”

“This,” Bruce points at Tim, like he’s pointing at a little cuddly bunny rabbit, and not a buck-sixty of highly-trained muscle and creepy, canny brain, “Cannot happen again.”

Jason leans back against the desk, casual. “Well, that’s it, Timmers. You had a good run, but Dad says no head injuries ever again. Time you retired.”

Bruce is scowling. “That’s not-”

“Or I can lend you a helmet,” Jason cuts him off, smiling. “The colour’s right and everything.”

“This isn’t a joking matter,” Bruce snaps. “You nearly killed him.”

It’s an atomic bomb of a comment. Just like he meant it to be. Tim looks surprised, but he shouldn’t. Or maybe Bats doesn’t talk to him that way, saves it all up special for Jason.

“Yeah,” Jason says, stripped bare of anything but the truth - no attitude, no humour, nothing, “I did. I hurt him. I wanted to kill him. I wanted to kill _you_.”

There’s plenty he doesn’t regret. Plenty of blood on his hands he’d happily get all over again. But there are also things he would take back, starting with the sick bite of a chainsaw between the vertebrae of drug pushers and ending with his bullet in Tim Drake’s shoulder. 

Doing what he does is a necessity. He believes that to the core. The taste for violence, the pleasure in it, the crack and wavering of his control - that’s dangerous for him. It’s an addiction that he needs to kick. 

He’s not sure if his words are offering that up as supplication, or just rubbing what he’s done in Bruce’s face. Bruce doesn’t give anything away. He never really does; not for free.

“And every time you did, you took yourself further and further from what that represents,” he says, and points at the thing Jason has been trying to ignore this whole time.

His old uniform, enshrined and adorned with the worst inscription Jason has ever fucking seen. It’s certainly no _do not stand at my grave and weep_.

Because Jason isn’t dead, but the kid he was? The kid that Bruce claimed as his own, the one he claimed to love? That kid is. And this is the grave.

A good soldier. A good _fucking_ soldier.

“Bruce,” Tim says, and he sounds tentative. He’s watching Jason’s hand, while Bruce is looking him dead in the eye.

“Every time you do, you prove me wrong for ever letting you wear it,” Bruce continues.

“Fuck you,” Jason rasps, and throws.

It’s a direct hit. The glass cracks and falls in a cacophony, echoing in a roll across the cave to the point it compounds on itself. The batarang lodges directly into the armour over where Jason’s fifteen-year-old heart would have been.

“ _Fuck you_ ,” Jason’s mouth says. “I was never your soldier.” His brain, that part of him that has been getting quieter and quieter since he left this place, the useless part that screams _you replaced me_ over and over, is deafening. All he can hear is that, and the insistent thrum of his own heart.

There are hands in the front of his jacket. He and Bruce are eye-to-eye, and it gives Jason a great view of his rage. In that moment, Jason has never been surer that he’s about to be hit, and that’s saying something, considering his entire life.

He’s holding the front of Batman’s uniform so tight that his nails are breaking on the kevlar weave. 

“ _Stop_.” That’s Tim, probably not for the first time either. But this time he prises himself into the space between them, unignorable. 

Bruce leans back immediately, letting Jason go. Unfortunately, Jason can’t quite convince his hands to release, or his brain to stop _screaming_.

Tim is holding his wrists, face very serious. He whispers, “Breathe.” Jason wants to break him in half, but he doesn’t, and he doesn’t, and he doesn’t.

His fingers relax.

“Gentlemen. What on earth is the meaning of this?”

It’s Alfred. He looks _furious._

All three of them freeze. Then Tim lets go of Jason like he’s on fire. It would be funny, if it weren’t for Alfred’s gimlet gaze bearing down on them. Or if the entire preceding five minutes hadn’t happened.

“Master Tim,” Alfred says after a long moment where none of them move, “I believe you have some homework to finish.”

Tim opens his mouth like he’s going to protest, and then sees the escape route for what it is and takes it like the scuttling schoolboy he is. 

Once he’s gone, Alfred turns. “Master Bruce.”

There’s a very long silence. Then Bruce says, “Hrn,” and turns away in the direction of the showers.

That just leaves Jason, still taut with adrenaline to the point his hands shake, standing below, and Alfred like an avenging angel above him, and a pile of glittering glass shards in the corner.

“Master Jason,” Alfred says, and then smiles. “Welcome home.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter three! Or, as I call it: 'Three Idiots (Bad At Caring)'

Alfred Pennyworth may be biased, but he’s fairly certain that there has never been a group of such extraordinary individuals as everyone who has ever worn the Wayne name.

That doesn’t make anything easier. It makes precisely nothing easier, and perhaps everything more difficult than it should be.

Jason Todd-Wayne, who is having a very quiet panic attack at the kitchen table, is a difficult thing. Extraordinary, of course. But difficult.

“Lad,” Alfred says, “It’s okay.”

“I should go,” Jason says without meeting his eyes. His voice is impressively level. Someone taught the boy how to control his breathing out of hectic hyperventilation, and Alfred would be grateful for it if the implied necessity of that teaching didn’t break his heart.

“You certainly should not,” Alfred replies, because being able to breathe is one thing, and being able to drive is another entirely. “Tea?”

This time Jason does meet his gaze. He looks suspicious. 

“I’m an old man,” Alfred reminds him, “And even if I had ulterior motives, tea isn’t the vehicle I’d choose for it.”

“You’d slip downers into tea in a heartbeat.”

“Coffee, perhaps. Not tea. That would be a terrible waste.”

“You’re not that old,” Jason blurts, and then fixes his eyes back onto the table. There’s a distinctive pinking of his ears.

“Of course not,” Alfred replies easily. “You and your siblings have just driven me entirely grey.”

Jason’s mouth twists. “They’re not my siblings.” Then he covers his face with both hands.

“It seems like you haven’t had the best of days,” Alfred observes after a long moment. An understatement, by all accounts. 

“Well,” Jason rasps through his palms, “I’ve had worse, too.”

Alfred lowers a mug and saucer onto the table in front of him. “In my experience, that realisation very rarely helps the haver deal with a current issue.”

Jason drops his hands. Behind them, his eyes are dry but red-rimmed. He says, “I don’t think you want me to be upset.” It’s a warning, a throwback to a hundred temper tantrums from before he ever died and the ongoing...temper tantrum he’s been having since his return. 

“My boy, I would never presume to tell you how to feel,” Alfred replies, sitting down with his own cup of tea. The bergamot is a comfort. “Only that you should.”

“I hope you tell B that every day of his life,” Jason says, and picks up the tea cup. It draws Alfred’s attention to the size of his hands, just barely smaller than Bruce’s. The contrast between that and Alfred’s memories of him as a boy sitting in this same kitchen with this same tea service, chatting about his day at school, is enough to make Alfred blink.

“Twice a day, if I can,” he replies, after taking a moment to clear his throat.

The truth of it is that he’s at least partly raised a number of boys and nursed them through more than their fair shares of heartbreak and trauma, and yet he’s still not entirely sure what to do here. There are always two sides to Jason: the child that was murdered, and all the terrible consuming grief wound up in that, and the near-stranger of a man in the manor kitchen with challenge writ large across his face, the one whose existence is a miracle. 

Bruce, for whom relief is a foreign concept, seems tangled deep in the grief still. That leaves it to Alfred to lean the other way, as ever. 

Which is why Alfred makes a point to meet Jason’s eye and say, honestly and to the point, “It’s so good to see you, Master Jason.”

Jason leans back in his seat, tilting his head as his cup rises to his chin. Combative and defensive in one. “Is it?”

“Of course,” Alfred replies mildly. “I only wish you’d come back sooner.”

“Hmpf.” Jason doesn’t seem to know what to make of that. It’s fine: Alfred remembers very clearly how careful they’d been, in the beginning, to not play into Jason’s expectations of how adults would treat him. The savviness that kept the child alive on the streets had kept him feral as a stray dog amongst the order of the manor, utterly untrusting and ready to bite. It had been a task and half to gentle him, part showing them who they were and part showing him that he himself could be more than the little lost boy dying from the world’s lack of love and care.

Maybe now it’s the same, Alfred thinks. Jason, under the thin veneer of wanting a fight, still gives away his hunger here by coming back, and by staying now. Not for food - though he could use some - but for love. And not out of faith - because a far stupider man than Alfred could see that Jason’s hurt at his father’s hands had nothing to do with being surprised by it - but out of hope.

Of course, hope is just another kind of sustenance, and the hunger for it will starve a boy or a man the same way.

“Tell me what you’ve done during your latest travels,” Alfred says.

“Went places. Met people,” Jason says, and then shrugs. “Killed some of them.”

Alfred raises an eyebrow but says nothing. He doesn’t need to. After a moment Jason looks down, shuffling in his seat like a scolded child. He mutters, “I learned. Got my head on straight. Been living on the Island with Starfire and Arsenal for a while until Timothy decided to drag me back here.”

“And what do you make of our…revenant problem?”

“I’ve been here five minutes, I’ve got nothing,” Jason admits freely. He takes a sip of tea and sighs. “I bet it’s a fluke though.”

“You know I don’t gamble.”

Jason rolls his eyes. It makes him look young. “It’s a figure of speech. Anyway, I think the kid’s some kind of meta. A really shitty one.” 

“What led you to consider that hypothesis?”

“That normal people don’t just come back from the dead? And I think he’s shitty because he’s alive but not doing so great right now.”

“Hm,” Alfred replies. There’s the unspoken fact between them that Jason spent months catatonic and wandering the city, remembering nothing more than his father’s name. “What is your next move?”

“Uh, I thought I’d leave,” Jason says, as though this should be obvious.

Alfred considers what he wants to say, which is  _ please don’t go _ , and then says instead, mildly, “Why is that?”

Jason is avoiding his gaze now, and drumming his fingers soundlessly on the edge of the table. “Because it’s better.”

_ For who _ ? Alfred doesn’t ask, because the answer is obvious.

“You said you’d stay for a week,” Master Tim says from the kitchen doorway, where he’s entered on silent feet. 

Jason doesn’t startle, but there’s a shift in the set of his shoulders, a certain widening and relaxing of his stance. He says, “I don’t think I can help you, mastermind.”

“We haven’t even started yet.” Timothy sounds stymied, more a child than the highly competent young man he is. 

The look Jason gives him is gimlet-grave. “Yeah, and it’s been going super well for me so far.”

“You have a real opportunity to help here, and you’re going to go back to hide on your island?”

“Master Tim,” Alfred interjects, stern. 

“I know Daddy’s got his heart set on turning you into a mini-me detective, but there’s nothing world-changingly important about a fifteen-year-old in a coma,” Jason replies, whip-quick. “Not to you, not to me, and certainly not to him.”

Tim blinks. “I have a dad.” 

“My condolences,” Jason replies with a twist of his mouth. He stands. “Thanks for the tea, Al.”

“Of course, Master Jason,” Alfred demures. “Master Tim? Have you completed your homework?”

“I’ve got a,” Tim begins, and then sighs. He gives Alfred a faintly pleading look, the reason for which he cannot determine. “Yeah, okay.” He melts back into the darkness of the doorway.

“It must be nice having at least one lackey who obeys your every command,” Jason comments, as though he wasn’t less than half the headstrong troublemaker Tim is when he was the same age. And as though Alfred has ever lost a disagreement in this household. 

“Your room is available, of course, or any of the guest suites if you’d prefer them.”

Jason’s mouth twitches downwards into half of a snarl, but his voice is mild when he says, “Thanks but no thanks. I’m out of here.”

“I hope to see you again soon,” Alfred says, standing himself. His back twinges, reminding him that, jokes aside, he’s much too old to be up at this hour of the morning if no one’s life is actively in danger.

He’s surprised when Jason embraces him of his own accord. He hugs like his father, like a big man who remembers far too clearly being a little boy, clumsy and a touch too firm. Alfred returns it unhesitatingly, with just the same heaviness in his chest that he feels with Bruce.

“He does love you,” Alfred says, not a last-ditch effort to make him stay, but a reminder. One he shouldn’t have to give, but one he will anyway, whenever he thinks it’s necessary. 

“Love was never the problem,” Jason replies, pulling away. His voice is very quiet. “And it ain’t the solution, either.”

* * *

“That was dramatic,” Tim says into the silence of the cave, because his head hurts and he’s irritated that Bruce is pretending not to have noticed him come in and he honestly can’t think of a better way to start the conversation.

“Tim,” Bruce replies, without looking away from the screens. “How’s your head?”

“Fine,” Tim says. He’s not really interested in discussing it. Bruce seems equally disinterested in calling Tim out on the lie, because there’s a long silence before he next speaks.

“You shouldn’t have brought him here.” The reproach in his voice is mild, but present.

“And you shouldn’t have said that to him.” Tim’s tone is considerably less mild. 

“Excuse me?”

The thing about Bruce Wayne - the real Bruce, the one behind the Brucie mask and inside the bat uniform - is that he has an innate talent in saying things that cut to the bone. They’re rarely untrue, but also rarely tactful, sharpened by an admirable intelligence and not at all tempered by the empathy Bruce actually has plenty of. Not that you’d know it.

That’s why he said  _ you prove me wrong _ to Jason, driving the wedge between them deeper, and why he says that  _ excuse me _ to Tim, just daring him to keep talking. Of course, Tim didn’t get into the Batcave by backing down.

“You can’t have it both ways,” Tim says, gesturing to the case. Or, the pile of glass shards which was the case. Bruce still isn’t looking at him, and he doesn’t respond, but he’s clearly listening. “You can’t have your son who you just want better for, and Red Hood who you hate. It’s not fair.”

“Fair?” Oh, and now that voice is forbidding.

“To either of you,” Tim clarifies. Because that had been his overarching thought, watching the two of them go head to head at cross-angles. 

“We’re not discussing this,” Bruce says stiffly.

“Then just listen,” Tim says. “He came here to help me with an investigation. So don’t use me as your excuse for driving him away.”

That finally makes Bruce turn in his chair. “Tim. It’s inexcusable of him to hurt you. It’s not an excuse to make him leave. It’s a reason.”

Tim rolls his eyes. “But you don’t need a reason, do you?”

“Jason is...important to me.” He looks constipated saying it, not that Tim would expect anything different. “But I also watched him tear a swathe through this city.”

“He’s changed.” That, Tim is certain of. He hadn’t needed to see Jason on the island to know it - the old Jason, the one who’d shown up at Titans’ Tower in that Robin uniform, the one who’d tried to kill them all more than once - he never would have left Gotham. He would have died there first.

Tim isn’t certain about it, but he thinks Bruce did think Jason was dead, when the Red Hood disappeared months ago. He’d been alternatively distant and frigid when he was present, and it had echoed memories of the Bruce Tim had first met. Whatever he’d felt then, it was never relief. 

“We aren’t discussing Red Hood,” Bruce says, turning back to the screen.

“It was disrespectful,” Tim says quietly to his back, undeterred. “He would never say he died for you. But he did die in your uniform. So don’t tell him now that he wasn’t worth wearing it.”

“Tim.” It’s a growl.

“Because, if it were me -”

“It won’t be you.” As though by words alone he can make that true. Well, if anyone could, it would be Batman. “You’re benched. Seven days.”

Tim isn’t surprised. “Fine. You should talk to him yourself.”

“He already left,” Bruce replies, gesturing to the bank of screens which run the security footage around the manor constantly in their corner of the cave. The same screens that Bruce had been staring at when Tim came in. 

Tim doesn’t understand it. Years of treating him in a way that he can recognise was neglectful, and Tim and his father are building a relationship now. They’re trying. And here is Bruce, whose son was  _ dead _ , apparently unwilling to try with Jason despite wanting to. 

Batman and Robin were always meant to be different, though. For that, Tim is grateful. 

He says, “I don’t know if you’ve heard of this neat new invention, it’s called a cell phone -”

“Tim,” Bruce interrupts. “Please.”

He sounds tired. And he probably always is, considering the hours he keeps, but it’s rare for him to actually sound it. Almost as rare as him saying, ‘please’.

“Okay,” Tim says. “I’m going to go home.”

“You can stay the night.”

The offer is well-worn. “It’s already going to be hard enough to slip past Dad. Even he knows a high school debate isn’t an all-night affair. I’ll get an Uber.”

“Alfred will drive you.”

“I’ll be fine.” His phone is in his hand, the app pulled up. There aren’t usually many cars on this side of the bridge, but the time it’ll take for one to arrive will give him time to get upstairs. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Leslie needs to check your concussion.”

“Yeah, tomorrow,” Tim says, waving him off, already halfway to the stairs. “See you.”

“Be careful.” Those words are well-worn too. Bruce always sounds like Alfred when he says them. 

“Always am,” Tim replies. It’s most-of-the-way true.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come hang with me on [tumblr](https://badacts.tumblr.com/)
> 
> :)


End file.
